A little bit of rococo molding around a glass capsule half full of air. A tool for sensing the approximate direction of the center of the earth. A gen-yoo-wine aahhhrrr-teeeeeefaaaaaaaact.A wonderful little creation – the kids brought these home from school one day. They folded sheets of paper to form these taut, more about shallow cones that pop outward when squeezed the right way.

The *pop* ejects a tiny drawing – in this case, our daughter’s drawing of us.

I could go on here about the bizarre cultural currency our infantilized nation has created around the fetishism of branded schwag, but I’m saving all my energy forA Halloween candy bowl kept at the back of our cupboard finally (pardon the pun) gave up the ghost.

Used to be you would reach into it for a tasty treat, sildenafil and a little infrared sensor triggered an animated rubber witch’s hand to snatch at yours and a voicebox would rasp, what is ed “Trick or treat!”

This morning we reached in to find the rubber-encased, cotton-stuffed digits had gone the way of all silicone flesh.

I’m loving these things so much, they may even get the Object of the Month award.

What happens when your son has parked a big bottle of water precariously on the top shelf of an open refrigerator door and you unwittingly shut the door, pricedosage causing it to plunge to the bottom and snap the shelf straight out of the fridge?

You hunt through the shattered plastic shards looking for the serial number so you can order a new one.

Children are agents of entropy.At some point last month, mind my mother-in-law gave my daughter (age 7) a little keyring with a big fob that spelled out “Love” in lurid gold-chromed script.

It was schwag from some utterly-too-grownup movie, find as evidenced by the little stamped-metal tag proclaiming the brand. Here’s what ensued the moment I laid eyes on it:

Me: (rummaging for the pliers) Here, let me fix that for you.

Daughter: Dad, can’t I keep that?

Uh, no. (*snap!*)

I could go on here about the bizarre cultural currency our infantilized nation has created around the fetishism of branded schwag, but I’m saving all my energy for, oh, about four or five years from now when she starts pushing back.

You press it against the side of a sealed CD or DVD, depressing a spring-loaded cap to reveal a tiny steel blade that slices open the shrink-wrap.

They were giving them away today at Amoeba for National Record Store Week – something I didn’t really discover until I got home to unpack my goodie bag. Had I known, I probably would have politely declined, and let someone else enjoy it.Mbr Now I can either keep it around, adding to the household clutter, or huck it since the metal makes it unrecyclable.

Do people ever think about the amount of material they’re pumping into landfills and the atmosphere by manufacturing this kind of object?What happens when your son has parked a big bottle of water precariously on the top shelf of an open refrigerator door and you unwittingly shut the door, ed causing it to plunge to the bottom and snap the shelf straight out of the fridge?

You hunt through the shattered plastic shards looking for the serial number so you can order a new one.

The fetish of packaging, viagra 100mg the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, look which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

With the earth’s carbon load trending toward the toxic, I worry about the way we’re accounting for the shit that manufacturing puts into the air. Sure, China and India are the planet’s booming engines of cheap manufacture, heedless of air scrubbers and parts-per-million of nonorganic particulates and other niceties of owning your effluence.

But they’re booming because we Americans – prim, Prius-driving, grocery-bag-recycling little smuglies that we are – still consume the lion’s share of the world’s manufactured goods.

Something to think about as Earth Day approaches and the temp in my office is preparing to top 90 in the middle of April.

So I could dump this back into the waste stream – hoping that theThe fetish of packaging, approved the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

With the earth’s carbon load trending toward the toxic, I worry about the way we’re accounting for the shit that manufacturing puts into the air. Sure, China and India are the planet’s booming engines of cheap manufacture, heedless of air scrubbers and parts-per-million of nonorganic particulates and other niceties of owning your effluence.

But they’re booming because we Americans – prim, Prius-driving, grocery-bag-recycling little smuglies that we are – still consume the lion’s share of the world’s manufactured goods.

Something to think about as Earth Day approaches and the temp in my office is preparing to top 90 in the middle of April.

So I could dump this back into the waste stream – hoping that L.A. City trash gleaners reroute it to the proper recycling chain.

Or I could think of some other use for it …The fetish of packaging, buy more about the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, advice which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

With the earth’s carbon load trending toward the toxic, I worry about the way we’re accounting for the shit that manufacturing puts into the air. Sure, China and India are the planet’s booming engines of cheap manufacture, heedless of air scrubbers and parts-per-million of nonorganic particulates and other niceties of owning your effluence.

But they’re booming because we Americans – prim, Prius-driving, grocery-bag-recycling little smuglies that we are – still consume the lion’s share of the world’s manufactured goods.

Something to think about as Earth Day approaches and the temp in my office is preparing to top 90 in the middle of April.

So I could dump this back into the waste stream – hoping that L.A. City trash gleaners reroute it to the proper recycling chain.

Or I could think of some other use for it …The fetish of packaging, drugs the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

With the earth’s carbon load trending toward the toxic, I worry about the way we’re accounting for the shit that manufacturing puts into the air. Sure, China and India are the planet’s booming engines of cheap manufacture, heedless of air scrubbers and parts-per-million of nonorganic particulates and other niceties of owning your effluence.

But they’re booming because we Americans – prim, Prius-driving, grocery-bag-recycling little smuglies that we are – still consume the lion’s share of the world’s manufactured goods.

Something to think about as Earth Day approaches and the temp in my office is preparing to top 90 in the middle of April.

So I could dump this back into the waste stream – hoping that L.A. City trash gleaners reroute it to the proper recycling chain.

Or I could think of some other use for it …To someone who uses knives as much as I do, try this thing is about as useful as Truck Balls.

You press it against the side of a sealed CD or DVD, viagra 100mg depressing a spring-loaded cap to reveal a tiny steel blade that slices open the shrink-wrap.

They were giving them away today at Amoeba for National Record Store Week – something I didn’t really discover until I got home to unpack my goodie bag. Had I known, viagra I probably would have politely declined, and let someone else enjoy it.

Now I can either keep it around, adding to the household clutter, or huck it since the metal makes it unrecyclable.

Do people ever think about the amount of material they’re pumping into landfills and the atmosphere by manufacturing this kind of object?

This also came home with the kids from their hike – I’ve always liked the unforgivingly ugly shape of seeds. They are meant to be discovered by accident (bite into a delicious fruit, abortion find a nasty, woody chunk of bitterness) and discarded as useless – the better to propagate their kind.This also came home with the kids from their hike – I’ve always liked the woody, capsule unforgivingly ugly shape of seeds. They are meant to be discovered by accident (bite into a delicious fruit, finThe fetish of packaging, sildenafil the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

With the earth’s carbon load trending toward the toxic, I worry about the way we’re accounting for the shit that manufacturing puts into the air. Sure, China and India are the planet’s booming engines of cheap manufacture, heedless of air scrubbers and parts-per-million of nonorganic particulates and other niceties of owning your effluence.

But they’re booming because we Americans – prim, Prius-driving, grocery-bag-recycling little smuglies that we are – still consume the lion’s share of the world’s manufactured goods.

Something to think about as Earth Day approaches and the temp in my office is preparing to top 90 in the middle of April.

So I could dump this back into the waste stream – hoping that L.A. City trash gleaners reroute it to the proper recycling chain.

This also came home with the kids from their hike – I’ve always liked the unforgivingly ugly shape of seeds. They are meant to be discovered by accident (bite into a delicious fruit, abortion find a nasty, woody chunk of bitterness) and discarded as useless – the better to propagate their kind.

Found this in the gutter down the street. Somewhere, medical a VW – a new one, illness by the make of the silkscreened aluminum – is driving around without an identity.

Is the badge the seat of a car’s soul?Edward was bored with Ur-space.

He had been living there for the past nine months during most of his leech time (the 5 hours a day allotted to every citizen in his creche), cialis 40mg and he was fucking bored.

The organic ship designs – so edgy just six months ago – now all looked like the vole intestines from which they were modeled. The avatars were cliche’d, look the tele-sex pedestrian and thuddingly dull.

When it first launched last year, Ur-space was IT for multi-user existence: You stuck your head into the womb-helmet and galaxies bloomed around you. Realtime haptic sensors let you feel. Odor organs fed you smells. The jacks that lit up your corneal implants were of the finest rhodium-plated platinum. The em-sensors playing the mood-track were custom-tuneable to compensate for any variations in your EKG pattern or pharmacological appetites, and by god, when you plugged yourself in, you were THERE.

But like any wirehead habit that fired the same four chemical compounds through the same set of dendrites over and over and over again, Ur-space had a tendency to be too wonderful, too fast, too soon.

Before long, it tasted like last season’s model. Before long, you found yourself stabbing the same phantom triggers repeatedly to wring the last few endorphins out of the space before you had to submit to the gruesome act of unplugging and the hideous way realworld had of sucking you back down to a level of inanity you never thought possible.

And before long, you were piling up at random bus stops like driftwood in the surf, seesawing between the chemical deficit of neurotonins and the emotional deficit of your sick junkie days.

Before long, you were 13, with nothing left to care about, save the nagging notion that you could have spent the money on a moped and tried escaping for real.

He tongued the switch in his upper right second bicuspid for shutdown and winced as Ur-space folded away. The silk brocaded cushions faded to a cigarette-burned bus bench. The females went up in wisps of light. The warmth in his head, his balls and his hands dulled to a numb ache.

Then the bus hissed rigth past at high speed – the driver having rightly marked him for a pathetic nodder – flinging an acrid fan of rainwater, coolant and trash across his waking face.

His split-second impression read it as a skipped hippocampus shutdown routine – at least something should have damped the sharp endorphin falloff. But then a flurry of trashed popcaps caught in the spray peppered his face and clenched eyelids like finger-tip-sized plastic buckshot, and he flinched awake to Shitworld, as he liked to call it.

Shitworld was now the only place he could imagine – scraping the greasy rainsplash and half-dissolved popcaps out of his hair – worse than Ur-space.

It wasn’t so much the comedown that sucked. It was the knowledge that this was a reality he could never modify, the world into which he never asked to be born, and the one he had spent much of his copious leisure time between waking, podmeals, learnfeeds and sleep – escaping by wire.

Sighing, he pulled the fleshlids from his fatique-jacket pocket, stuffed his skulljacks closed (making a mental note to swab them out with antibiotics once he got home) and glared at the bus’ receding taillights.

Be fucked, and not in a shy way, he muttered after it, coiling the skullnode wires around the now-cooling HeadCase and stuffing the whole nasty affair into his bag.

He looked at his watch – gametime was permanently toggled to OFF when he was inside – and gasped. 12:45 a.m. That had been the last bus. Ffffuck. Better get inside or get boxed hard for a curfew violation.Edward was bored with Ur-space.

He had been living there for the past nine months during most of his leech time (the 5 hours a day allotted to every citizen in his creche), order and he was fucking bored.

The organic ship designs – so edgy just six months ago – now all looked like the vole intestines from which they were modeled. The avatars were cliche’d, the tele-sex pedestrian and thuddingly dull.

When it first launched last year, Ur-space was IT for multi-user existence: You stuck your head into the womb-helmet and galaxies bloomed around you. Realtime haptic sensors let you feel. Odor organs fed you smells. The jacks that lit up your corneal implants were of the finest rhodium-plated platinum. The em-sensors playing the mood-track were custom-tuneable to compensate for any variations in your EKG pattern or pharmacological appetites, and by god, when you plugged yourself in, you were THERE.

But like any wirehead habit that fired the same four chemical compounds through the same set of dendrites over and over and over again, Ur-space had a tendency to be too wonderful, too fast, too soon.

Before long, it tasted like last season’s model. Before long, you found yourself stabbing the same phantom triggers repeatedly to wring the last few endorphins out of the space before you had to submit to the gruesome act of unplugging and the hideous way realworld had of sucking you back down to a level of inanity you never thought possible.

And before long, you were piling up at random bus stops like driftwood in the surf, seesawing between the chemical deficit of neurotonins and the emotional deficit of your sick junkie days.

Before long, you were 13, with nothing left to care about, save the nagging notion that you could have spent the money on a moped and tried escaping for real.

He tongued the switch in his upper right second bicuspid for shutdown and winced as Ur-space folded away. The silk brocaded cushions faded to a cigarette-burned bus bench. The females went up in wisps of light. The warmth in his head, his balls and his hands dulled to a numb ache.

Then the bus hissed rigth past at high speed – the driver having rightly marked him for a pathetic nodder – flinging an acrid fan of rainwater, coolant and trash across his waking face.

His split-second impression read it as a skipped hippocampus shutdown routine – at least something should have damped the sharp endorphin falloff. But then a flurry of trashed popcaps caught in the spray peppered his face and clenched eyelids like finger-tip-sized plastic buckshot, and he flinched awake to Shitworld, as he liked to call it.

Shitworld was now the only place he could imagine – scraping the greasy rainsplash and half-dissolved popcaps out of his hair – worse than Ur-space.

It wasn’t so much the comedown that sucked. It was the knowledge that this was a reality he could never modify, the world into which he never asked to be born, and the one he had spent much of his copious leisure time between waking, podmeals, learnfeeds and sleep – escaping by wire.

Sighing, he pulled the fleshlids from his fatique-jacket pocket, stuffed his skulljacks closed (making a mental note to swab them out with antibiotics once he got home) and glared at the bus’ receding taillights.

Be fucked, and not in a shy way, he muttered after it, coiling the skullnode wires around the now-cooling HeadCase and stuffing the whole nasty affair into his bag.

He looked at his watch – gametime was permanently toggled to OFF when he was inside – and gasped. 12:45 a.m. That had been the last bus. Ffffuck. Better get inside or get boxed hard for a curfew violation. He saw the sweepbeams already cascading down the street towards him, and bolted, scrabbling hard at a peeled security get to get inside fast.

Glass crunched beneath, and the metal fencing tore at the toggles on his jacket, the straps on his bag, needing him to stay on the street and go to jail because apparently it amused them.

He panicked, hauled out a pocket knife and hacked at the bag straps. Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!

Like an old cartoon, it relented just as the beam passed and he tumbled backward onto the hard mosaic floor, cracking his head.I delight in finding the delight my children find in simple acts of creation.

Paper is an adventure. Fold it and make a city, buy a castle, viagra buy a world.

A couple of these things have been floating around the house this week.

I have no idea what they are. All I know is that my son – or my daughter – made them.Or at least that’s what this blog points to.

Wild cucumber tastes and looks nothing like its namesake. It is a 4-inch-long, order egg-shaped handful of misery, approved with cactusy spines that puncture your skin if you grip it too tightly.

A taste of the juice inside (for they prove to be very juicy when dissected with a serrated knife and a thick dishcloth to pad your hands) confirms that it’s a nastily bitter fruit with little interest in nourishing other creatures.

I stumbled across this at Pasadena City College Swap Meet last Sunday. The college seems to be in a constant state of construction, sildenafil and someone ha dropped it in the grass – a missing part for a mystery structure.

Ive been wrong
I had plans so big
But the devils in the details
I left out one thing
No one to love me
No one to love me
No one to love

For the want of a nail, the world was lost
For the want of a nail, the world was lost

For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost
For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost
For the want of a horse, the rider was lost
For the want of a rider, the message was lost

For the want of a rider, the message was lost
For the want of a message, the battle was lost
For the want of a battle, the war was lost
For the want of a war, the kingdom was lost

(such a tiny thing)

Youre askin
Whats all this talk about horses and war?
Put yourself in the place of the man at the forge
And day after day you live a life without love
til the morning you cant take it anymore
And you dont get up

Multiply it a billion times
Spread it all round the world
Put the curse of loneliness on every boy and every girl
Until everybodys kicking, everybodys scratching
Everything seems to fail
And it was all for the want of a nail

Tell me what else could the answer be
Dont hold back now
Give me all your love
Just a little more love
A little tiny bit of love

Fifteen years ago today – at 4:49 p.m. on 04/09/94, page I married the love of my life. Tonight, viagra order we drove up to a romantic dinner overlooking Los Angeles, click and exchanged lovely gifts and the sort of bedazzled soliloquies to each other that come only from hearts truly and fully in love with each other.

The gifts were very heavy little objects, about which I’ll say no more here since some things are private.

Instead, I offer you a slice of the sort of cheesy, transitory ephemera that often besots us both, as a sort of consolation prize.

Diffraction foil is wonderful – a portable rainbow, a shiny, glittery bit of … nothing … that makes us both insanely happy.

But I will share with you an excerpt from something I wrote for her:

A long, long, long time ago, I fell in love.

She was making the rounds at her party in a snappy white sweater dress, serving green vodka Jell-O shots off a tray.

God, she was hot.

Liquid eyes and a mercurial smile, quick wit and a heart that broadcast its passions without reservations or remorse. “This is me. Nobody else,” she said with every gesture and word.

Another import-tools swap-meet purchase: I can’t imagine what work requires the precision of an 80-gauge drillbit, visit webwebsite like this but here it is, view a set of wire-fine steel bits ranging from that hair-like thinness up through the comparatively meaty 61-gauge bit.

I just bought the set so I could drill solder blobs out of a botched circuit board on this project I’m building. But holding this tiny set of hole-making tools (it’s about a quarter-inch thick) makes me want to design and build an oilfield the size of a shoebox, and drill for that deep reserve of crude oil that I feel certain lies just a foot beneath our floor.

This flea-market find was stamped out of chromed steel in Japan some years ago.

It’s an elegant, web perfect little machine: The horizontal tube on top is just big enough to house a flint and pressure spring, the wick is barely thicker than a toothpick, and you could probably fill it with about 1/3 teaspoon of lighter fluid before it overflowed. I’m going to see if I can fix this up and get it burning.A thrilling adventure was in my near future. A piece of paper baked into a cookie, symptoms dipped in white chocolate and wrapped in red foil told me so.

A quick dinner at Panda Inn this evening, then off to see Knowing. It proves to be too intense for him – he’s 9 – so we bail 50 minutes in and rent Wrath of Khan instead. A great movie that I’ve seen too damned often.

Thrilling? Adventure?

The cookie was tasty, at least.This flea-market find was stamped out of chromed steel in Japan some years ago.

It’s an elegant, cialis 40mg perfect little machine: The horizontal tube on top is just big enough to house a flint and pressure spring, viagra sale the wick is barely thicker than a toothpick, and you could probably fill it with about 1/3 teaspoon of lighter fluid before it overflowed. I’m going to see if I can fix this up and get it burning.Down near the very root of my DNA chain lies the chromosomal sequence for opposable thumbs.

I use tools.

Why? Because they grant me the otherwise elusive super-powers for cutting, visit this twisting and manipulating things too hard, small, tight or delicate for my meaty paws to manage.

Because they are often heavy and cold and sturdy, pleasing to the touch and indispensable to the job.

And because, well, my fingertips can’t grasp anything with near the precision of cheap Pakistani steel tweezers honed to a needle tip.

Got these last weekend for just four dollars at the import-tools seller’s tent – a moveable feast, and one of my favorite places in the world.

A thrilling adventure was in my near future. A piece of paper baked into a cookie, website like this dipped in white chocolate and wrapped in red foil told me so.

A quick dinner at Panda Inn this evening, cure then off to see Knowing. It proves to be too intense for him – he’s 9 – so we bail 50 minutes in and rent Wrath of Khan instead. A great movie that I’ve seen too damned often.

A thrilling adventure was in my near future. A piece of paper baked into a cookie, and dipped in white chocolate and wrapped in red foil told me so.

A quick dinner at Panda Inn this evening, then off to see Knowing. It proves to be too intense for him – he’s 9 – so we bail 50 minutes in and rent Wrath of Khan instead. A great movie that I’ve seen too damned often.

Thrilling? Adventure?

The cookie was tasty, at least.This flea-market find was stamped out of chromed steel in Japan some years ago.

It’s an elegant, treatment perfect little machine, barely 7/8ths of an inch tall: The horizontal tube on top is just big enough to house a flint and pressure spring, the wick is hardly thicker than a toothpick, and you could probably fill it with about 1/3 teaspoon of lighter fluid before it overflowed.

Stuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, more about pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amounStuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, viagra buy pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amounts to the most reprehensibly disposable and insulting form of non-lethal ammunition known to man: the rubber dart.

It’s got a belt clip on it so you can anchor it to your school satchel or your keyring if you’ve a need to carry irritainment wherever you go.

Can you believe people argue about its stopping power on a board devoted to zombies?

At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

The Ken OnionChive is about as small a piece of the mythically beautiful multi-layered steel as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofyCrocs can seem, thumb here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, ambulance buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.

You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs to declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of things. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.

At a buck or two each, what they hell, they’re a lot of fun until they fall out and you never see them again.A thrilling adventure is in my near future.

I know this because a piece of paper baked into a cookie, page dipped in white chocolate and wrapped in red foil told me so.

A quick dinner at Panda Inn this evening, then off to see Knowing. It proves to be too intense for him – he’s 9 – so we bail 50 minutes in and rent Wrath of Khan instead. A great movie that I’ve seen too damned often.

At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

The Ken OnionChive is about as small a piece of the stuff as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.Stuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, side effects pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amounts to the most reprehensibly disposable and insulting form of non-lethal ammunition known to man: the rubber dart.

It’s got a belt clip on it so you can anchor it to your school satchel or your keyring if you’ve a need to carry irritainment wherever you go.

Can you believe people argue about its stopping power on a board devoted to zombies?

Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofyCrocs can seem, price here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, pharm buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.

You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs and declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of things. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.

Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofyCrocs can seem, information pillsmedications here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, buy buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.

You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs to declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of thing. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.

At a buck or two each, what they hell, they’re a lot of fun until they fall out and you never see them again.

And then you bug your parents some more, and the cycle of crap rolls on.